Military matters: arms, warriors, strategy, and history
I write a weekly book review for the Daily News of Galveston County. (It is not the biggest daily newspaper in Texas, but it is the oldest.) After my review appears on Sunday, I post the previous week’s review here on Sunday.... [Read More]
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There is a curious subculture on YouTube of exploring and, sometimes at great personal risk, taste-testing military rations, sometimes from wars fought long before the tester/taster was born. Big Clive was motivated to contribute to this genre, and posted this taste test of one of the last MREs (Meals, Ready-to-Eat) prepared by the Scottish Army before it was assimilated into the British armed forces. All of the major food groups a proper Scotsman should require are provided: sugar, alcohol, carbohydrates, nicotine, and plutonium.
... [Read More]
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I write a weekly book review for the Daily News of Galveston County. (It is not the biggest daily newspaper in Texas, but it is the oldest.) After my review appears on Sunday, I post the previous week’s review here on Sunday.
By MARK LARDAS... [Read More]
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I write a weekly book review for the Daily News of Galveston County. (It is not the biggest daily newspaper in Texas, but it is the oldest.) After my review appears on Sunday, I post the previous week’s review here on Sunday.... [Read More]
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Russia, Syria, and Iran are killing, or on their way to killing, thousands of innocent civilians in Idlib Province. Don’t do it! Turkey is working hard to stop this carnage.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2019
Half a million refugees are now fleeing to try to find safety after civilians were targeted by Syrian air strikes in areas held by the Turkish incursion.
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Prior to World War II, the sleepy rural part of the southern California coast between Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo was best known as the location where, in September 1923, despite a lighthouse having been in operation at Arguello Point since 1901, the U.S. Navy suffered its worst peacetime disaster, when seven destroyers, travelling at 20 knots, ran aground at Honda Point, resulting in the loss of all seven ships and the deaths of 23 crewmembers. In the 1930s, following additional wrecks in the area, a lifeboat station was established in conjunction with the lighthouse.
During World War II, the Army acquired 92,000 acres (372 km²) in the area for a training base which was called Camp Cooke, after a cavalry general who served in the Civil War, in wars with Indian tribes, and in the Mexican-American War. The camp was used for training Army troops in a variety of weapons and in tank maneuvers. After the end of the war, the base was closed and placed on inactive status, but was re-opened after the outbreak of war in Korea to train tank crews. It was once again mothballed in 1953, and remained inactive until 1957, when 64,000 acres were transferred to the U.S. Air Force to establish a missile base on the West Coast, initially called Cooke Air Force Base, intended to train missile crews and also serve as the U.S.’s first operational intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) site. On October 4th, 1958, the base was renamed Vandenberg Air Force Base in honour of the late General Hoyt Vandenberg, former Air Force Chief of Staff and Director of Central Intelligence.... [Read More]
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Burkina Faso is the country that used to be the French colony of Upper Volta. It is a landlocked country about the size of Colorado. It is in west Africa, where it sits on top of Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo and Benin. To its north and west is Mali; to its east is Niger. It is a tropical country with a rainy season and a dry season. Nearly all of the rain falls in the south. The middle of the country is savannah, and the northern part is Sahara Desert.
Yes, this is another post about Islamicist terrorism in Africa. I am writing to relay some information about recent violence. Muslim jihadi raiders have been on a killing spree for the past few years. In particular, jihadi attacks started ramping up five years ago and have grown dramatically in the past three years. This has gone largely unnoticed by American media.
One of our Ratburghers has a relative who was serving as a Christian missionary in Burkina Faso. He was pulled out last year, on account of increasing violence.
Continue reading “Jihadi Gold Raiders of Burkina Faso”
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OK, prompted by Trinity Waters’s post about Patton’s 1944 Christmas message to the troops, I feel like telling my father’s story of that Christmas in a boxcar.
I don’t believe my father got to hear Patton’s message. He was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. They were marched and then loaded in boxcars. For some days they had been parked on a siding.
They were crowded fifty men in a small cold boxcar, taking turns at one tiny window. They had not eaten in a week. When it was his turn at the window late Christmas morning, he decided to thumb his nose at adversity and treat the group to a day’s menu at the small-town hotel where he had been desk clerk through college. He recited the menu from memory.
When he finished, someone said from the far corner, “Where did you say that hotel was?” And it turned out the man had stayed there. Dad got a better look at him and said, “ I can’t remember your name but you stayed in room 214 with another student from your university- you dated his sister, a student at the nearby women’s college, and were there for a formal dance. And…you borrowed my tuxedo!”
Christmas 1944. My Dad would be 100 now (yes he was VERY OLD when I was born) and the events and the culture of his times are fading into history. That happened 75 years ago, and he retold it many times-he was a good story teller. Circa 1975 my mother whispered to me that she lacked the nerve to remind my father that at one time he would roll his eyes at WWI veterans’ stories and say “Don’t they know it was 25 years ago?”
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The best part of the UK Election result is it is the last linchpin for a new economics of the planet. The post Nixon era of globalists buying congress and the Federal Bureaucracy to keep the money , assets, skills , intellectual property and jobs flowing out of the US is crashing down. With the incentives for relocation of the supply chains out of China (both from tariffs by the USA and Chinese blatant piracy), the rejection of NAFTA and TPP, we are forming a group of the USA, Japan, Mexico, Canada, and now the UK , with potential for Australia and Brazil to join who will implement fair trade and real win win economics. Canada will eventually come along politically out of necessity. The UK -US deal will begin the complete destruction of the EU as an economic cartel.
The implications are staggering for the chance of keeping freedom alive for a few more generations.... [Read More]
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I recently appeared on The Space Shot talking about GPS.
https://thespaceshot.fireside.fm/403
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This document was released to the general public by the United States War Department on August 12th, 1945, just days after nuclear weapons had been dropped on Japan (Hiroshima on August 6th and Nagasaki on August 9th). The author, Prof. Henry D. Smyth of Princeton University, had worked on the Manhattan Project since early 1941, was involved in a variety of theoretical and practical aspects of the effort, and possessed security clearances which gave him access to all of the laboratories and production facilities involved in the project. In May, 1944, Smyth, who had suggested such a publication, was given the go ahead by the Manhattan Project’s Military Policy Committee to prepare an unclassified summary of the bomb project. This would have a dual purpose: to disclose to citizens and taxpayers what had been done on their behalf, and to provide scientists and engineers involved in the project a guide to what they could discuss openly in the postwar period: if it was in the “Smyth Report” (as it came to be called), it was public information, otherwise mum’s the word.
The report is a both an introduction to the physics underlying nuclear fission and its use in both steady-state reactors and explosives, production of fissile material (both separation of reactive Uranium-235 from the much more abundant Uranium-238 and production of Plutonium-239 in nuclear reactors), and the administrative history and structure of the project. Viewed as a historical document, the report is as interesting in what it left out as what was disclosed. Essentially none of the key details discovered and developed by the Manhattan Project which might be of use to aspiring bomb makers appear here. The key pieces of information which were not known to interested physicists in 1940 before the curtain of secrecy descended upon anything related to nuclear fission were inherently disclosed by the very fact that a fission bomb had been built, detonated, and produced a very large explosive yield.... [Read More]
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A+ correction pic.twitter.com/LveoknpEkG
— Jake Maccoby (@jdmaccoby) November 22, 2019
Continue reading “Great Moments in Military Journalism”
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I write a weekly book review for the Daily News of Galveston County. (It is not the biggest daily newspaper in Texas, but it is the oldest.) After my review appears on Sunday, I post the previous week’s review here on Sunday.
By MARK LARDAS... [Read More]
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This may be the other way around, he may be waiting at the “Rainbow Bridge” for his beloved pet.
Sorry, but this brought tears to my eyes, this veteran is just about a year older than I am and I think that maybe sharing it is the right thing to do.... [Read More]
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